Workfare and Dr. King

Workers World, Editorial, 23 January 1997

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Just to mention his name is to
recall the heroic and massive civil-rights movement. The
fight of Black America for equality under the law. The
struggle to move forward from the back of the bus. He is now
the first African American to have a national holiday in his
honor, another victory that was won through struggle.

But Dr. King was not simply an icon. As a Black leader he
was always the target of racists, from Nazis in Cicero,
Ill., to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. And as a leader, King
was constantly changing and developing.

In the year before he was assassinated, Dr. King had begun
to move in a direction the ruling class hated. After years
of caution regarding the U.S. war against Vietnam, he came
out strongly against it in the spring of 1967. His project
for 1968 was to be a "Poor People's March," a caravan of the
country's poor to Washington to demand relief. And on the
day of his murder in April 1968 he was supporting striking
Memphis sanitation workers.

To go in this direction meant to join the civil-rights and
anti-war movements with the struggles of the working class,
especially the lowest-paid workers. His fight was no longer
just for equality under the law, but for economic equality,
and it meant solidarity with the poor all over the world.
His last expression of that fight was to stand with 1,300
low-paid Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers in their strike.

In 1968 the wages of the lowest-paid workers were rising.
Today they are again under the most severe attack. The
ruling class has found a way to hire workers at lower than
the lowest minimums in a new relationship that tastes of
slavery. It's called workfare.

It wears the phony disguise of welfare reform. It's
supposed to train people to get jobs. But it actually forces
welfare recipients to work simply to receive their
inadequate welfare benefits. It rests on a foundation of
racist rhetoric against the poor and oppressed. It forces
these workers to toil in jobs otherwise held by workers who
get a living wage and union representation--and thereby
threatens union rights and overall wage rates.

Workfare workers' struggles are a worthy successor to Dr.
King's final battle in Memphis. A victory for the most
oppressed sector of the working class is a victory for all
workers and oppressed people. This, ultimately, is the
lesson of the movement Dr. King led.